Just wanted to let you all in on a small project that I've been working on for the past few days.

I just found my old ThinkPad 600 with a 233 MHz PII and 96MB RAM.
The disk is a simple 6 GB IDE.
It's with an internal CD drive but sadly I've lost the external floppy drive years ago.

Sadly I couldn't use a CD as a boot floppy. I guess the BIOS is simply to old, 'cause checking the CD directly in VMware worked like a charm.

So without going into all the details, I used VMware Fusion on my OS X laptop and connected the laptops IDE drive using an old external USB IDE drive controller and made a raw device mapping to the disk in VMware.
Then simply installed OpenStep, Patch4 and only ran the initial configuration.

Then I moved the disk to the laptop where I booted using the "APM"="NO" parameters and voila, the laptop booted OpenStep.

Now there's still a lot that doesn't work including sound and proper graphic. But I expect to get the graphic working once I've looked further into it.

When booting the system it keeps looking for the floppy device at fc0. Currently I have to wait for 6 timeouts before it continues.
It's naturally because my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive connected.
Therefore I removed the "Floppy" entry in "Boot Drivers" in \private\Drivers\i386\System.config\instance0.table.

Regarding the "APM"="NO" setting I've normally entered at boot, I have now set it in \private\Drivers\i386\System.config\instance0.table where I simply replaced the line "APM"="YES" with "APM"="NO".

The Power Management hardware in the laptop and the software in OpenStep is simply not compatible.

I've a problem with the system beeping like crazy and then freezing completely.
I remember something about PII's locking the system when certain keys were pressed. It might be a long shot but I'll try the old workaround on this area.

Configure.app does see the driver and it does list it a the compatible driver for the ThinkPad 600. However after I removed the VESA driver and added the NeoMagic and of course rebooted the laptop it simply booted up with a white screen.

I'll have a go at compiling the driver using the source but I don't believe that it will make much difference.
If anybodt know of a compiled version listed as a OpenStep 4.2 version I would be thrilled to hear about.

Otherwise it sorta spells the end of this small "Can we get OpenStep on this laptop" test.

Still haven't succeeded on the NeoMagic driver but after googling quite a bit I stumbled over an entry at nextcube.org which could be a newer version of the driver.
I've emailed to the person and asked if he's willing to share it.

Might be nothing but it's worth a shot.

Regarding the laptop starting bipping and then freezing it seems to be solved by having the keyboard layout set to NeXTDansk instead of Dansk.
I expect it would be the same for all the other layouts.

Right... not much new about the Sound Blaster emulation, but since my system has had these weird freezes and keeps being a major problem for any actual use of the laptop, I decided to try and fix it.

So far this is only documentation of my steps.

Disable on-board memory (32 mb):
I entered the BIOS, using F1 at boot.
Entered the "Config" panel.
Hit "CTRL" + "D" to go to the CMOS HEX editor.
Went to B 20 and changed 80 to 81.
Shutdown the machine and turned it on again.
It now shows only 64 mb which fits the 2 x 32 memory modules.

Sadly did didn't fix my issues. System still freezes with 4-6 very fast beeps.

I also replaced the CMOS battery with a new Duracell 2025 and initialized the system via F1 > Initialize > Reboot.

Nice progress you made. I especially like the idea to initialize the laptop's HDD on the Mac with an IDE/USB adapter. I would have assumed that one will not get the correct drivers for the laptop doing it this way because the VMWare environment is different.

I have a ThinkPad 560 here which should be very compatible. Need to find some time to set it up...

Using "Sound Blaster 8 (4.00)" on DMA 1, IRQ Level 5.
Also notice that Quick Boot must be disabled for this to work.
A copuple of different sources also claims that it's necessary to initialize the BIOS afterwards.

Apparently several of the ThinkPads had this Sound Blaster emulation possibility.

Just saw Billiards.app autoplay with sounds for the first time.

Last edited by Daxziz on Sun Jan 08, 2017 4:22 pm; edited 1 time in total

Nice progress you made. I especially like the idea to initialize the laptop's HDD on the Mac with an IDE/USB adapter. I would have assumed that one will not get the correct drivers for the laptop doing it this way because the VMWare environment is different.

I have a ThinkPad 560 here which should be very compatible. Need to find some time to set it up...

According to ThinkWiki.org the following models should be compatible in regards to SB emulation.

380XD, 380Z
385XD
560X, 560Z
600
770, 770E, 770ED

Regarding the drivers in VMware. You're quite right. It does indeed depend on what kinda drivers are used in VMware, but luckily this is a match :)